Thread by @Shayan86

THREAD: I've spent the last day of September trying to come up with as accurate a number as I can possibly arrive at for the number of times QAnon-related hashtags have been used on Twitter in the first nine months of this year. And I now have a figure: 20.6 million times

These are the hashtags I've used. I decided to stick with hashtags rather than specific terms and phrases as those quarterly samples included many tweets from news organisations, journalists and ordinary users. While samples with only hashtags mostly featured tweets by QAnoners

There are 4.8 million tweets in the first quarter (1 Jan-31 Mar). #QAnon (2.8m) #WWG1WGA (2.1m) are the most popular ones in the period. Biggest tweet of the quarter is full NESARA GESARA. The global geographical spread of the hashtags shows QAnon is still primarily US-centric

There are 10.9 million tweets from 1 Apr-30 Jun. #Pizzagate (1.1m) has a sudden resurgence. And we see the rise of #TakeTheOath (480k). Biggest tweet of the quarter is indeed a #TakeTheOath video. Geographical map shows QAnon is beginning to spread to Europe and South America

In the third quarter (1 Jul-30 Sep) we see the full adoption of #SaveTheChildren (1m) and #SaveOurChildren (480k). As Twitter restrictions come in, all the other hashtags fall sharply. Biggest tweet of the period is related to child trafficking. QAnon has become bigger globally

Add the numbers from all three quarters (4.8m, 10.9m, 4.9m) and you get the magic number of 20.6m tweets. Once again, this is not a definitive number. For that, I'd have to sift through all the tweets from each quarterly sample. But it's as close to accurate as I can get.